Help Families From Day 1

By CLARE HUNTINGTON

September 2, 2014

THE opening of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-kindergarten program this week will give 53,000 children access to free, full-day pre-K in New York City, compared with 20,000 enrolled last year. This is well worth celebrating, and other cities and states should follow suit. But this investment in school preparation is not enough. If we want to close the income-based achievement gap, we need to begin much earlier.

Families are the ultimate pre-pre-school. Research in neuroscience and other fields has established that parents and caregivers provide a crucial foundation during the first few years of life. Our public policies, however, make it much harder for families, especially families living in poverty, to lay this foundation.

In my research, I have cataloged government policies that undermine parent-child relationships during early childhood. Our legal system, for example, destabilizes low-income, unmarried families, distracting them from parenting. Forty-one percent of children are born to unmarried parents. These parents are usually romantically involved when the child is born, but these relationships often end. Rather than help these ex-partners make the transition into co-parenting relationships, the legal system exacerbates acrimony between them. States impose child support orders that many low-income fathers are unable to pay, creating tremendous resentment for both parents. And courts are not a realistic resource for many unmarried parents, leaving them to work out problems on their own.

Our workplace protection laws likewise do too little to address the needs of families. The dearth of paid parental leave means that many parents have to choose between their job and bonding with their newborn. Our unwillingness to regulate the scheduling of part-time work means that some parents scramble daily to find child care. And our inability to substantially raise the minimum wage means that parents often have to work multiple jobs, limiting time at home.

Finally, land-use policies rarely prioritize building physical environments that facilitate simple but vital parent-child interactions, like going to a playground or the library. Too many impersonal neighborhoods lack spaces where parents and children can spend time with other families, providing much needed social support.

All of these examples, and so many other policies, fly in the face of what we know about the importance of a child’s first few years. When parents are consumed by fractious relationships, it is harder to provide children with the one-on-one interactions that are the building blocks for brain development. When parents have to work multiple low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules, satisfying the universal advice to read to children is remarkably difficult. When families don’t have access to safe playgrounds, they lack the space for casual play and the opportunity to meet other parents for the all-important kvetch.

I don’t want to rain on the pre-K parade, but we can’t pretend that school preparation begins at age 4. Four is better than 5, but zero is far better than 4.

To promote co-parenting and family stability, we should develop alternatives to the court system. Since 2006, for example, the Australian government has funded Family Relationship Centers, which offer free or low-cost, community-based mediation to help parents who are separating cooperatively manage the transition from one household to two. In the United States, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement has begun to recognize the importance of connecting fathers with job training and ensuring that fathers have access to their children, efforts that have increased earnings and child support payments. We need to adopt programs like these much more broadly.

To help low-wage workers give their children the time and attention critical to child development, we need regulations that allow parents more control over their schedules. Living wage legislation, like Seattle’s recent $15-an-hour provision, and a sizable increase in the earned-income tax credit, one of our most effective poverty-fighting tools, would also go a long way toward helping parents meet their children’s needs.

Finally, to ensure that all families live in neighborhoods that help parents interact easily with their children and other parents, local governments should look to the Stapleton development in Denver. This community, built on a decommissioned airport, includes mixed-income housing, sidewalks, common areas, parks, shops, schools and public transportation. This pattern of development allows families to be together easily and create essential social ties.

But this didn’t just happen. At every stage, Denver’s involvement was key. The city ensured that the plan was part of the sale agreement for the airport, funded needed infrastructure, and sold the land incrementally so the developer did not have to take on the kinds of loans that force quick and cheap development.

Critics will dismiss these ideas as unnecessary intervention in family life, or more big government. But this is simply wrong. Our legal system is already deeply involved in every aspect of family life, from defining what a family is in the first place to subsidizing families through public education and deductions for dependents. The real question is not the magnitude of that involvement, but the ends it serves.

It will take tremendous political will to build a policy framework to improve early childhood. The progress we’ve seen toward universal pre-K is encouraging. Now we need to start on Day 1.

Clare Huntington, a law professor at Fordham, is the author of “Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships.”